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CEO and Founder of IBG Plc discuss IBG's e-commerce clients and Sweatband.com Full article published: 02/17/2003     MAZIAR DARVISH is CEO & Founder of Internet Business Group Plc


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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript as part of the Technology Sector, available at (001-212-952-7433) or http://www.twst.com/sectors/techno.html

TWST: Could you bring us up to date on Internet Business Group since we last spoke with you and give us a brief background for those not familiar with you?

Mr. Darvish: Internet Business Group (IBG) is a company listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange. We floated about two and a half years ago and at that time our business was predominantly web development, design and software engineering. As there has been a downturn in the core internet professional services market, we’ve evolved a business over the last two or so years to be a lot more orientated towards e-commerce. Now, we own and operate a number of different e-commerce operations in the UK market and are very much focused on this.

TWST: What challenges have you faced in year 2002?

Mr. Darvish: The challenge we faced in the year 2002 was making sure we were one of the survivors. Previously, there had been a lot of excitement in the market. There were a lot of companies with great ambitions that started to fail in 2002. Our primary challenge was to scale down our professional services business whilst simultaneously growing our e-commerce activities. This has ensured that we have survived the downturn and have businesses operating in growth markets.

TWST: Who are your competitors in this space and with all the shaking out have some left the e-commerce arena?

Mr. Darvish: Well, a lot of the shakeout in the e-commerce space has been driven by companies that had flawed business plans. Typically they operated a business model whereby they would spend more money on customer acquisition than the amount of margin they were making out of that customer. This has resulted a few high profile failures, such as Boo.com, as well a significant volume of smaller companies closing. That’s cleaned up the marketplace a bit and, if anything, the effect of the investment downturn has been very positive for the e-commerce market. It has created a level playing field whereby everyone has t make money out of each and every customer that they sell to and companies are no longer able to gain a competitive advantage through having raised more funds than the people they are competing with.

TWST: What do you think your competitive advantages are?

Mr. Darvish: Our competitive advantages come from the unique mix of the businesses that we have. We still operate a scaled down internet professional services business where we carry out design and development work for companies like Singapore Airlines & Reebok Fitness in the UK. The implication of this is that we are able to carry out all web design and development for our e-commerce operations in-house. A lot of the costs that e-commerce companies normally incur are for software development, technology, architecture, design and spending money on marketing services. We have a core skill set of people whose costs are actually paid for by our fee-paying clients.


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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript on 02/17/03. For more information call (212) 952 7400. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

Copyright 2003, Wall Street Transcript Corp.

SECTOR LINKS

  • Computers & Electronics
  • Internet, Software & Services
  • Telecommunications


     

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